QotW4: It's All In The Giving

I remember when I was a lot younger and when I was still living with my grandparents, I was asked to pay the neighbours’ a visit with a dish wrapped carefully with tin foil to preserve the heat. This would happen regularly and always just before dinnertime. I never asked why I had to do it because when you are young, you never question the elders.

When an aunt got married off, the same people who received dishes from my grandparents on a regularly basis helped out with the wedding. It was the kind of community spirit I never experienced again since I moved out from my grandparents’.

In his definition on what is a gift, Peter Kollock maintains that it is something “exchanged between individuals who are part of an ongoing interdependent relationship” (1999). This definition was in comparison to what makes a commodity. My community spirit experience of giving-without-being-asked was a form of social exchange, one major example of the gift economy.

In the online world, there are numerous projects individuals take on to satisfy their own self-interests with other like-minded individuals –be it software developing, movements or information sharing. Richard Barbrook illustrates the situation of gift economies in the past when he talks about the open source movement that gradually became a mainstream affair after a few decades (2005).

Barbrook regards the open source movement as an example of early non-commercial productions one could find online at that point of time. Also, he regards blogging as a mass phenomenon from small minority beginnings. Barbrook points out that people do not realise that in sharing photos on Flickr and posting songs online may hurt media corporations. He goes on to say that there is a connection between perceived social altruism and commercial self-interest. Most people, some of whom are free market fanatics, tend to check the possibility of free download before they make their purchase online.

Despite the definitions, examples of sustainability and problems discussed by both Kollock and Barbrook about the mechanics of gift economies, there are still critics who feel the concept in itself is a naïve notion. They do not believe that people will want to cooperate out of mere self-interest in getting something done or willingly share information without expecting anything back in return. Some made the comparison that of the two –market economy and gift economy –the latter is the less efficient (Pollard, 2005).

In his concluding paragraph to his blog entry, Can We Make The Gift Economy Work, Dave Pollard poses a question:

“And if we could, could the Gift Economy be the key, the thin edge of the wedge to change everything, to save the world?”

Well, it saved my iPod.

I had my iPod given to me as a birthday present. I was careless with it and dropped it a few times. So one day, when it finally crashed on me due to the partially damaged hard disk, I happily went to have it repair, thinking they could fix the problem in no time. I was wrong of course. My iPod came without a warranty and the repair company could not do anything about it except to sell me a new one because they do not technically repair spoilt iPods, they give out new ones only if you present your warranty.

I told them I would think about buying a new one and started to fret as soon as I stepped out of the store. I went back home, got online and looked for good deals on iPods. When I could not find a price I was satisfied with, I googled for people who might have suffered the same fate as me.

I was in luck. I came across Josh Higland’s blog, his Replacing The Hard drive of An Ipod in particular. In this entry, not only did he come up with a solution, he provided step-by-step pictures to illustrate the procedure to his solution. This entry attracted a lot of attention and people post comments, offering other alternative solutions to iPod problems.

Josh Higland could have sold this information for quite a bit of money but he did not. I am sure if there are a lot of individuals like Josh Highland, in time to come the answer to Pollard’s question will be a resounding ‘yes’.

References

Barbrook, R. (2005). The Hi-Tech Gift Economy. First Monday Special Issue 3. Retrieved February 10, 2007, from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/

Kollock, P. (1999). The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace. Retrieved February 10, 2007, from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm

Pollard, D. (2005). Can We Make The Gift Economy Work. Salon Radio Weblog. Retrieved February 10, 2007, from http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/07/31.html